Progress will unavoidably kill more and more physical shops, but this has huge cons: cities are emptier and more dangerous.
In the average European mediterranean city, shops provide lights, vibe, safety.
As people feel less secure, because it's getting dark at 5-6 pm half the year (the time people usually leave work) and shops are closed, they also go downtown less accelerating the death of other businesses. And the only people on the streets are either those returning home, drunks, or immigrants doing god knows what. And this progressive decay accelerates. The only shops left are then bought en masse by foreign entrepeneurs, often working the place with their families 16 hours per day to squeeze pennies.
Any random downtown in Italy bar the most touristic places that have people all year suffers of this, even major centers (100k+ citizens).
Rents do get progressively lower in distressed areas because they are distressed, and higher in high demand ones, but that's not enough when less customers are entering your shops anyway.
Commercial units sit empty instead of lowering rents because of the 'extend and pretend' in lending. The banks can't afford to revalue commercial real estate at the current market rate. It's like the 70s again.
There's no design of anybody, red tape and taxes have always been there, but they are not a problem of many sectors, but commerce in particular in this period of time, and not just in Italy but globally.
It isn't so much extend and pretend, its landlord CANT lower the rent without violating their loan.
If you get government involved, this will just get more expensive. We need to wait it out until the landlord can't pay the loan anyway and is forced to sell the building at a massive loss. Then the new owner will have a new loan with a new price floor and the dance can start over.
Or you pay minimum rent but your landlord gives you some of it back?
Idk, there's probably room for creativity here
Investment real estate has traditionally been a way for individuals and small landlords to build wealth over time. More recently, governments have decided that they want to add tons and tons of regulations to rentals, making it impossible for small landlords to continue to make a profit. Hence, they sell to big landlords who are impossible for tenants to deal with.
I mean isn’t the whole rub the cost of housing is outpacing wages? Goes to show how short our historical perspective really is.
It is not:) There was a fortunate coincidence of factors like economy, demography, immigration from EU countries which enabled it. Now that's all over, it's gone.
If you go out after 7 pm most of the year half the people downtown are immigrants selling drugs, doing petty crime or whistling and annoying women.
One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty, which makes sense, since those who are doing well have more motivation to avoid disturbing the status quo.
That's what's going on here. @passive is repeating the word "fact" from the parent comment.
It's not merely a bit controversial, it's heresy
UPD: looked at your other comments... wow..
It's quite possible that high levels of immigration of unskilled or otherwise unemployable people is a bad thing for a country that shouldn't be allowed. That is a very different thing than acting like the reason it is a bad idea is because of their culture or race.
That is my problem with the whole thing, all just gets thrown into one bag "immigrants". The women assaulting islamist gets the same label as the homosexual atheist fleeing where they are in charge. (And never mind that the bible contains mostly the same bad passages as the quoran and I never done the numbers, but I assume if we count and plot "muslims killed by non non muslims vs "non muslims killed by muslims" - that number would match the felt reality)
What does "by extension" mean? Culture is voluntary. You can (and should) walk away from a flawed culture. Race is an unsheddable fixed attribute.
Meanwhile, both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups, making discrimination a losing proposition even aside from its inherent immorality.
Btw, the premise underlying this fact is a fallacy. It is the norm for population groups, even meaningfully differing ones, to have "more internal variation" than between groups.
There is more variation in height within sexes than between them, but despite this there is still a very (statistically and culturally) significant difference in average height between men and women.
It's even possible for two distributions to be completely separated by a given variable while still having more internal variance.
The tallest woman is far taller than the shortest man, so if you're hiring a librarian who needs to be able to reach books on a high shelf, you still need to look at the individual.
To a limited extent as an individual. One can't simply remake the entire world they were born within.
I'm just stating a fact: the presence of dangerous immigrants in downtown Reggio Emilia or Modena make these cities less safe, especially for women.
Immigrants make less than 10% of the population but account for 52% of small and 74% of violent crime, while sexual harassment reaches almost 90%.
I have been assaulted twice, my SO and her friend have been, and anybody we know has a similar story.
They make locals less prone to go shopping, and as shops close it enforces the vicious cycle of people not going downtown and thus more shops closing.
What are some of the other "facts" "we" know about?
I think the commenter has expanded further on what he or she thinks they ARE doing, I reserve judgement - but this phenomenon is apparent.
Yes, but be careful about implying that the dominant causation is poverty -> crime. Crime is the best cause of poverty because it makes doing business impossible and forces every actor to make every aspect of their life more and more inefficient in order to protect what they already have. Places like, say, Singapore are case studies in how a crackdown on law and order is all it takes to make a place go from very poor to extremely wealthy in a generation or so.
It's been allowed to fester because the late 20th century was (so far) the high water mark for societal tolerance of that sort of thing and it hasn't been abused enough since to really see much legal scrutiny.
High-trust Anglo civilization is not compatible with the attitude towards civil authority common in the 19th-century Mezzogiorno. It took literal generations to fix.
Waspy paternalism gave us eugenics, multi-generational welfare and plenty of other great stuff so it's not like the alternative is all that much better.
It's incredible how much of what we consider safety ultimately boils down to totally arbitrary vibes. There are tons of cities in the mediterranean that are way more dangerous than the worst parts of the uk, but because Italy has better PR (and isn't the target of right-wing hysteria), nobody cares.
Are there parts of society where this is different? This whole going concern is vibe-based.
Italian cities are depopulating because of economic decline, not because people feel increasingly unsafe after 5.